The present invention relate to a printing device control apparatus and method and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method of controlling a plurality of printing devices.
Printing devices use various printing schemes including electrophotography (laser beam printer) and ejection of ink droplets of a printer (ink-jet printer).
Generally, a laser printer is suitable for monochromatic, i.e., black-and-white printing, and the print quality of black and white portions is high. In addition, the laser printer has a high speed. On the other hand, an ink-jet printer is suited to printing a color image, though its speed is lower than that of the laser beam printer.
When a document is to be prepared by a document processing apparatus (including a personal computer), often almost all pages are monochromatic, and only several pages require color printing.
In this case, as color page portions are present, the operator performs operations to output the entire document to a color ink-jet printer for printing, or to output only the color page portions of the document to the color ink-jet printer and thereafter print the remaining monochromatic pages with a laser beam printer dedicated to monochromatic printing.
In the former case, the operator needs to perform the operation only once because the printing operation is completed with only one printing instruction. However, with the color ink-jet printer, a long time is required to complete printing of all pages.
In the latter case, if the apparatus itself has only one printer interface, switching connection of the two printers is necessary, and the printing instruction must be given at least twice. Even if the apparatus has two printer interfaces, the printing instructions must still be given at least twice. This also applies to a case in which the printers are connected to a network, and the color ink-jet printer and monochromatic laser beam printer on the network (or one of the printers is a local printer) perform print processing.